8 comments to Pure genius from the TaxPayers’ Alliance

There is nothing like an easy-to-follow illustration like this: no quantity of words can ever convey the message so readily.

Although there is a risk of being “too clever”, and of ingeniouesly-crafted false messages being put out in similar form, this should not stop all of us thinking about how a genuine message can be conveyed in a digestible form.

Okay… I get the spoof (very, very well done) and i get the headline (about 400 quid per person per year) – but aside from the creative form of the ad-hominem I don’t actually feel any better informed for watching the piece.

I hang out with enough Samizdatistas to have a grasp of the issues and complaints – so don’t flame me on that, please – but I’d be praising it if it did more than cited a few inaccessible numbers (of the bike-shed painting variety) and some comedy props.

Like, for instance, demonstrating the incompetence? Enumerating the controls and stupidities?

Making me care about this N billion more than the other N billion being spent on bailouts?

Alecm, who is on the side of the angels, demonstrates why our side is usually so bad at fighting the propaganda war. TaxPayers’ Alliance is a lobby, not a think-tank, and they are very good at the propaganda war. It is fighting for hearts and votes, not the intellectual high ground (not that they do not occupy it, but they are just fighting a different battle than, say, the Adam Smith Institute).

What Perry said. There are different ways to fight against nonsense, and taking the piss is part of that. Consider the influence of South Park’s skits, or the Penn & Teller “Bullshit” series, or for that matter those old Monty Python sketches mocking silly laws, etc. Go further back to the Ealing comedies of Passport to Pimlico, etc.

And of course look at the examples of Denis Leary, PJ O’Rourke, etc, in spreading anti-state, anti-nannying ideas.

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The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.